My takeaway is a bit not-apropos of his main point, but here goes:
Mutually Assured Destruction has indeed obsoleted conventional great-power warfare. This is not to say that we need to disarm, though! But we should dump as much as we can into cyber, because that’s how the next conflicts will be decided.
I’m actually not as alarmed here as most might suggest I should be, at the fact that we don’t appear to have any cyber edge over our primary adversaries. This is because cyber, unlike nukes, is one of those military assets that loses its entire value when you make it public.
So either way - whether we have a better cyber arsenal, or not - there’s little you or I can do from a public accountability standpoint. It’s not that our opinions won’t change public policy, it’s just that it’s a Schrödinger’s Arsenal: We’ll find out whether our government listened to us and bothered to have a sufficient one, when the actual shit goes down.
In the absence of actual warfare and conquest, economic and propaganda warfare is clearly the next realm of competition. Which sucks for us, because we’re… falling behind.
Fortunately for the West, it’s really just America that’s falling behind. Europe is twice our population and twice our economy. The only real problem is that Europe doesn’t have the military to fend for itself.
But that’ll sort itself out in a few generations, violently or not. The real long-term threat is that Europe’s systems of governance, while seemingly saner than America’s for now, clearly have the same sorts of insane fault lines sewn into them. They just haven’t had as much time under those systems for those fault lines to become as disastrous as they have here.
The U.S. has some talent in the cyber field. How much is hard to say and some of the problem may be getting everyone pointed in the same direction. Plenty of people are wary of working for the government; fears of governmental overreach permeate our society. We also have a hodge-podge of agencies each tasked with oversight of its own systems.
The U.S. has some talent in the cyber field. How much is hard to say and some of the problem may be getting everyone pointed in the same direction. Plenty of people are wary of working for the government; fears of governmental overreach permeate our society. We also have a hodge-podge of agencies each tasked with oversight of its own systems.
"They just haven’t had as much time under those systems for those fault lines to become as disastrous as they have here."
Except for the U.K., which uses the same electoral system as us (FPTP).